A copy editor once pointed out that I'd written 'look', 'looking' or 'looked' five times in one manuscript page - say, 250 words? Of course it's a copy-editor's job to flag up things which contravene the usual principles of good, fluent writing. And it's my job to decide if, this time, I meant it that way, so I had a long, hard look [sic]. One of them was easily dealt with: it was one of those all-purpose 'It looks like she meant to...' where it doesn't really need to be a verb about the physical act of seeing at all. But the others were all part of the scene and, as such, as much at the core of what was happening as the dialogue was. I think I found a replacement for one more of the 'looks', but stet-ed the others.
One of the nicest small compliments I've ever had about my writing from a pro was the writing teacher who said, 'I might have known you studied drama, Emma: I always know where all your characters are.' And it's true that I can't write a scene - whether it's a grand break-up or a stroll down a country lane - without seeing it: if you were a fly on the wall of the study you'd often see me peering into the distance to see what's inside my head. Not necessarily every last leaf on the trees or photo on the mantelpiece: those tend to come along as and when I need them. I don't usually even have a clear picture of people's faces, unless it's important that the reader knows something about the specifics of their looks. (And I'm seriously allergic to the short-cut character building that involves determined chins or sensitive hands.) Rather, as you do in a dream, I see the bulk of people, the gestures, the space between them that they do or don't cross, and that moment of crossing is often also the keystone in the arch of the scene. I know how much they can see of each other, what they can't, what they're avoiding.
I don't know what proper writers about writing call it, but I call it part of the choreography. Where and how people look at each other and their surroundings is as important as what they touch and how they touch it, what they smell and what it tells them, and so on. Of course it can become a habit, phatic utterance, padding, and you do get a lot of it in the work of writers who haven't yet learnt to be rigorous at that level. So often 'he looked' 'she thought' 'they wondered' can go, and be replaced by a straight statement of what they're seeing, thinking, wondering. But if you want to make the reader conscious of the seer's/thinker's/looker's consciousness, then it helps if you focus the reader on that consciousness operating. It seems to me that this:
I found a comfortable chair, and he poured the drinks and then turned away towards the window. Was that all he was going to do? Wasn't he going to say anything?
has a subtly different effect from this:
I looked for a comfortable chair and sat down, and watched as he poured the drinks and then turned away to stare out of the window. I stared at his back view. Was that all he was going to do? Wasn't he going to say anything?
It's one of those incredibly important subtleties which are crushed when a bad teacher of writing peddles a rule like always cutting out the apparently surplus-to-requirements 'looks'. Yes, it's only as writers progress that they begin to make either conscious or instinctive judgments about such subtleties, first after things are written, and then as they progress further, getting it right more often in the first place. That judgment is about which are earning their keep and which are truly phatic noise, and it's at least partly subjective. But they'll never develop that judgment at all if they're not shown the possibilities, helped to understand them, to develop their instinct, their ear, their mind's eye, their bodily imagination. It really is choreography, you see: a novel literally embodies a story, ideas, images, emotions, in imagined individual characters. And that being so, then the movement of those bodies in space, which includes looking and seeing, the direction of a gaze and then its withdrawal, is as important as it is in a play or a dance.
A novel, like a dance, exists in both time and space. A few posts ago I was thinking about how novels exist in two kinds of time: readerly time, into which, somehow, is compressed the story-time (Ulysses being a rare beast in taking longer to read than the day the story happens in). A book's readerly space is an even greater miracle of compression: whole worlds in something the size of a small ginger cake. But we speak more often of a novel's sense of place than we do of its sense of space. But while sense of place is often about atmosphere or mere verisimilitude, story-space, like story-time, is capable of all sorts of expansions and contractions and jump-cuts. A dancer on a stage can, simply by their bodily movement, make us feel that blank space as a vast meadow, or a tiny cell, and so can we in our writing. It's all in the choreography.
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And, yes, Paul Lamb pointed out that the original heading of the previous post could be interpreted, shall we say, in more than one way. Just goes to show I shouldn't post when I'm tired (not emotional, just tired). And how there is almost no common verb not capable of setting up a double entendre. If you don't know what I mean, bet you can work it out by reading the post.
